Review: Locusts and chimpanzees: minds of their own

John Kennedy, formerly professor of animal behaviour at Imperial College,
London, made his name studying how insects fly. This specialism may help
to explain the fervour of his preaching against the sin of anthropomorphism
– attributing human qualities to other animals. Few are tempted to ascribe
thoughts and feelings to a locust.

The problem, says Kennedy, is that ‘people have always been very ready
to believe that animals are like us in having feelings and purposes and
acting upon them’. So the scientific study of animal behaviour was inevitably
‘marked from birth by its anthropomorphic parentage’. It has had to ‘struggle
to free itself from this incubus and the struggle is not over’.

He has a point. If you say that an animal finds its way from A to B
because it has a ‘mental map’, you have not exactly added to the sum of
human knowledge. Nor is it helpful to explain the incessant movement of
swarming locusts by talk of a ‘locomotory drive’. To unravel the physiological
mechanisms that enable an animal to do things, scientists must avoid referring
to unobservable inner events. They should also eschew the mentalistic vocabulary,
and describe an animal as balked but not frustrated, or as scanning rather
than searching its environment.

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Kennedy’s book is filled with examples of cases where anthropomorphic
thinking seems to have led scientists astray. One of the most striking comes
from his own field of expertise. The assumption that flying animals feel
the force of the wind as we earthbound creatures do led to the erroneous
notion that a flying insect finds the source of an odour by following the
‘plume’ of odour carried by the wind. In reality, flying insects cannot
feel the wind because they are carried along by it. They arrive at the source
of an odour by doing something much more obscure.

Yet, in the end, Kennedy doth protest too much. For instance, he brands
one of Britain’s leading primatologists an unscientific anthropomorphist
because the monkey watcher entertains the notion that some primates may
be conscious participants in strategic games of social deception. But is
it really impossible to explore the possible mental experiences of other
animals without lapsing into pseudo-explanations?

In Kennedy’s view, we are not even allowed to say that animals suffer.
‘We can-not hope to tell from their behaviour whether they suffer or not.’
He dismisses the careful experimental work of the zoologist Marian Stamp
Dawkins at the University of Oxford, and does not mention the extensive
neurophysiological research on slaughter by agricultural researchers in
Britain.

In any case, it seems likely that nothing would convince this latter-day
Descartes. ‘Of course one cannot rule out the possibility that one day someone
will devise a satisfactory test for feeling in animals. But there is none
in sight and meanwhile it requires an anthropomorphic bias to be convinced
they have feelings.’

He warns scientists to avoid saying there are reasons to think that
animals suffer, for fear of tarnishing their ‘reputation for respecting
the truth’.

I hazard the opinion that Kennedy has fallen into his own trap. He concludes
that beliefs and desires can only be ascribed to humans because he thinks
we can know of these mental events only through introspection.

But there is a substantial band of thinkers who argue that mental events
are not really hidden away in your mind. As Andrew Whiten of the University
of St Andrews argues, we ‘read other people’s minds’ by observing and interpreting
their behaviour in the broadest sense.

Of course, people can talk and animals cannot. But we can still know
animals at least in part as we know other people – by their deeds. If that
is true, then there is no need to condemn a new science of behaviour based
on ‘critical anthropomorphism’, firmly grounded in observation and experiment.

‘Natural selection has produced animals that act as if they had minds
like ours,’ Kennedy says. I wonder why he thinks natural selection endowed
only humans with these things called minds. But then a locust is not much
like a chimpanzee. Perhaps it is a case of ‘entomological bias’.